Far back in the mists of time, PC games used to come in a very large box. With the advent of digital, the boxes went away. We, and Good Old Games (GoG), have not forgotten those eye-catching display pieces. The folks at GoG have gone so far as to start bringing them back. Some assembly required, of course.
The company isn’t doing this alone. Big Box Collection, an obsessed one-man show, provides scans of the original physical boxes to GoG, as well as the files needed for players to mess around with digital versions of the same units.
Good one, Good Old Games
Right now, there are just five titles on Good Old Games that support the new feature. Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, Armikrog, Hitman: Codename 47, Myst, and Descent are the first games to get the physical boxes included with the DRM-free download of the original game. There are also digital boxes. These were “scanned — front, back, spine, the works — and turned into rotatable 3D models you can download after purchase and open right in the 3D viewer that’s already built into Windows and Mac.”
But there’s also a printable PDF that buyers can plonk onto card stock, glue together, and place on their shelf. You could, in theory, use a less-than-life-sized print and have a mini collection of PC boxes that won’t take up an entire room, too.
The files appear in the downloads list of the relevant games, under the heading 3D Boxes.
Good Old Games added, “Physical media doesn’t survive the way software can — boxes get lost, crushed, thrown out. Scanning them, and letting you print your own, is preservation in a different shape: the same mission that keeps these games running on modern PCs, applied to the objects they used to come in.”
